The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War (review)

Writing a comprehensive text on the history of the United States Army during the Cold War is a daunting and complex task. Ingo Trauschweizer has done a masterful job of synthesizing a complicated and overwhelming topic. He argues that after World War II the U.S. Army began a quest to define and establish a doctrine that provided a strong deterrent capability for the United States in Europe, while also providing the ability to fight limited wars. According to Trauschweizer, this evolutionary process spanned the duration of the Cold War and achieved its objective in the post-Vietnam era. The history of the U.S. Army's development of doctrine provides the foundation of Trauschweizer's study.

Building on works such as David N. Schwartz's NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas, Jonathan House's Toward Combined Arms Warfare, and Andrew Bacevich's The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army Between Korea and Vietnam, Trauschweizer skillfully details an evolutionary process by which the United States Army in Europe worked toward defining a doctrine that emphasized the role and mission of the United States Army, while also meeting the constantly shifting demands of the Cold War security environment. To explain this process, Trauschweizer breaks the period into six chronological sections that highlight the various decisions made by the Army's leadership to adapt to the demands of the Cold War. The six periods, "The U.S. Army in National and Alliance Strategy," "Atomic Weapons and Limited War," "The Pentomic Army in Germany," "The ROAD Army and Flexible Response," "The ROAD Army in Germany and Vietnam," "The Cold War Army," also serve as chapters. In each chapter, the author highlights a stage of the Army's doctrinal development.

The two most significant chapters focus on the critical period between 1955 1961 and 1973-1983 respectively. First, Trauschweizer, using an impressive amount of primary research, details the attempts of Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor to shift the United States Army away from the tenets of the Eisenhower administration's concept of Massive Retaliation. The rationale Taylor presented to the administration as to the necessity to shift NATO and U.S. strategy away from the dangerous concept of Massive Retaliation in many ways serves as a tragic, yet farsighted, case study on the difficult demands of crafting and implementing doctrine and strategy in the tense period between 1955-1961. This chapter alone, merits close attention by historians. Trauschweizer presents Taylor as a dedicated and intelligent General who clearly saw the need to adapt the U.S. Army to the changing security environment. For Trauschweizer, Taylor becomes a tragic crusader who resigns his post in frustration at the Eisenhower administration's reluctance to embrace the concepts of "Flexible Response." Interestingly, President John F. Kennedy recalled Taylor because the president embraced his concept of "Flexible Response."

Trauschweizer's analysis and discussion of Taylor's efforts to re-orient the Army toward limited war with an increased emphasis on conventional forces serves as an excellent example of the author's firm grasp of the salient issues facing the transformation of the Army in the midst of the dynamic Cold War context. The analysis of the Army's war plans and organizational structure demonstrate Taylor's keen insights into the objective and tasks identified as necessary for the United States to meet the demands of the security environment in Europe. Simply, this chapter, based on Trauschweiter's analysis and his review of the primary sources, deserves widespread attention by Cold War and military historians alike.

The second significant chapter focuses on General William DePuy and the efforts of the U.S. Army to rebuild and re-orient itself in the aftermath of Vietnam. Within the context of his thesis, Trauschweizer argues that Vietnam served as an obstacle that truncated the developmental path begun by General Taylor in the late 1950s...